Pilgrim moved from worst performance category

Christine Legere @ChrisLegereCCT

Wednesday

Mar 6, 2019 at 6:30 PMMar 7, 2019 at 6:23 AM

Nuclear plant jumps to category requiring least oversight.

PLYMOUTH — Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station will get its wish “to finish strong,” due to a decision by federal regulators Wednesday to propel the 46-year-old plant back into Column 1 — the least restrictive for oversight — three months before its permanent closure.

“Each of our 600 employees committed themselves to returning the plant to the NRC’s top regulatory category, which required our performance and corrective actions to undergo thousands of hours of enhanced reviews and inspections over the last two years,” Brian Sullivan, site vice president and Entergy’s top official at Pilgrim, said in a statement.

Pilgrim had been floundering in Column 4 under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s performance standards since September 2015, classified as the worst-performing of the nation’s 98 commercial reactors and one step above mandatory closure.

In its assessment letter, the NRC said the plant had shown steady improvement in the areas of human performance, timely corrective action, risk recognition, conservative decision-making and plant safety culture.

Pilgrim 2018 Annual Assessment Letter by Cape Cod Times on Scribd

Edwin Lyman, acting director of the Nuclear Safety Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said it was somewhat surprising that Pilgrim went directly from Column 4 to Column 1, where only basic oversight is required.

“It looks like Pilgrim may have dug itself out from the pretty deep hole it was in,” Lyman said. “It’s a pretty big leap. They apparently did a lot of work.”

Attorney General Maura Healey has been critical of the plant's performance.

“Now is the wrong time to reduce federal oversight of the plant that has one of the worst safety records in the country," said her spokeswoman Chloe Gotsis. "It’s bewildering that the NRC would take this action with less than three months left before Pilgrim will permanently close.”

U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., reacted with skepticism.

“After receiving the lowest safety rating for years, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is now saying that all is right at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant,” Markey wrote in an email. “It’s hard to have faith in this miracle when we haven’t seen a strong commitment from Entergy to invest in upgrades, and it continues to request and receive exemptions from the NRC on safety requirements.”

U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Mass., welcomed the news.

“I have long urged the NRC to hold Entergy to the highest inspectional standards so that the plant was not allowed to languish at the lowest level of allowable operational safety as it approached the cessation of power generation operations,” he said in a written statement. “This announcement by the NRC is welcome, but should not result in any reduction in the NRC’s careful oversight of the plant’s operation.”

The status change has provoked criticism from local watchdogs, who argue that a litany of problems at the facility through the years has threatened public safety.

The director of the citizens group Pilgrim Watch called the plant upgrade “comical in a dark sort of way.”

“The new safety ranking has nothing to do with Entergy’s performance; instead it is all about NRC’s PR efforts to spin a false story that its robust oversight has turned around Pilgrim,” said Mary Lampert, of Duxbury.

Diane Turco, of Harwich, founder and president of the Cape Downwinders, expressed similar sentiments.

“The assessment is just boxes to check and has little basis in the reality of the dangers present at the degrading reactor,” Turco said. “Moving Pilgrim to Column 1 certainly highlights the NRC's role of promoting the nuclear industry.”

The Plymouth plant has come a long way, at least on paper, in the two years since a federal inspector commented in an in-house email that plant staff “seem overwhelmed just trying to run the station.”

In January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported Pilgrim operators had closed out the final 40 items on a list of 156 deficiencies identified in a “Confirmatory Action Letter” issued in 2017.

Pilgrim managers put together a recovery plan to address shortcomings and have been steadily crossing items off since.

The reactor is slated for permanent shutdown June 1.

“The professionalism and pride of our employees was evident every single day and along with strong support from our company’s nuclear division are the reasons we have greatly improved performance at this site,” the company’s statement says.

Since the action matrix to evaluate plant performance was established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2000, only nine plants have been placed in Column 4.

No plant has ever retired while in Column 4, according to NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan, although the column a plant is in when it permanently shuts down has no impact on federal oversight during decommissioning.

State Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro, has been a vigorous watchdog of the nuclear plant.

“I’m skeptical of the high rating,” he said. “Only the NRC could set up a rating system where you go from category 4, one step from forced shutdown, to being in category 1.

“I’m glad to see progress, but this shouldn’t take Pilgrim off the hook, and I worry this decision takes them off the hook for the last three months of operating.”

“Normal baseline inspection activities at the average single-unit Column 1 plant required just under 5,700 hours to complete,” he wrote in an email. “At Pilgrim, in 2018 around 11,300 hours of inspection-related activities were completed.”

Lampert said she was not surprised by the agency’s decision to allow Pilgrim to end its 46-year career on a high note.

“It’s like the Wild West,” she said. “They’re going out in a blaze of glory.”

A meeting to discuss the assessment letter and the upgrade of Pilgrim’s status will be held March 26 in Plymouth.

— Follow Christine Legere on Twitter: @ChrisLegereCCT.

Editor's note: The original version of this story contained the wrong day federal regulators decided to move Pilgrim back into Column 1. The story has been corrected.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.